Mux Mool

“I know it’s electronic music,” Brian Lindgren says, “but sometimes I feel like an old-timey traveling musician with an M-Audio Trigger Finger instead of a guitar.” As Mux Mool, Lindgren has been criss-crossing the country by himself for years, collecting records, loops, and samples, and rocking parties in towns both large and boondock-small. Lindgren is a self-confessed nerd to the bone, an incurable doodler, a Star Trek: The Next Generation fan; he lives on energy drinks and barely sleeps, spending his days working on music and his nights absorbing Internet memes by the hard-drive load. Mux Mool’s homespun electro hip-hop is the product of an introverted mind, an extroverted imagination, and a bottomless cultural appetite.

Lindgren’s life in music began in Minnesota with a cheap toy sampling keyboard (“I remember being so fascinated by how much a sound changed when you dropped it down several octaves”). Flash forward a few years (and more than a few keyboards), and the teenage Lindgren began recreating his favorite sounds—Dilla’s stutter-step beats, classic video-game music, abstract electronic noise—using software and digital effects, glazing them with tape hiss and vinyl static. An early Mux Mool track, the slinky strut of “Lost and Found,” was discovered by Moodgadget Records and released on their Rorschach Suite compilation, eventually finding its way onto iTunes’ Best of 2006 Electronic list. A string of EPs, tracks, and remixes followed, including the song-a-day project Drum EP, the grimy talkbox anthem “Night Court” on the Ghostly International/ comp Ghostly Swim in 2007, and the Ritalin-fueled “Ballad of Gloria Featherbottom” on 2009’s Moodgadget-curated Nocturnal Suite on Ghostly.